


Holding His Breath

by orphan_account



Category: Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Hobbits, Male Protagonist, POV Male Character, POV Third Person, Past Tense, Recovery, War, Wordcount: 100-1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-04
Updated: 2005-05-04
Packaged: 2017-10-09 07:14:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/84421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account





	Holding His Breath

Merry's hair was damp and sticky under Pippin's hand. Here in the sunlight he could see how colourless it had become, dirty and grey. Merry had always been rather on the clean side, at least compared to his cousin; Pippin wondered how those familiar curls could have gotten so dirty in so little time since the battle begun. Pippin had seen the battle. Even if he had thought of the combat he had seen before and multiplied that by a thousand he still could not have imagined it. Throngs, crowds, all stabbing, slashing, screaming, dying.

Merry had closed his eyes and fallen into a kind of half-sleep, eyes occasionally opening to slits, only to close again. Pippin didn't want to cry; he fought it. If he let go now, who knew if he could stop? And who knew what could still come up the street in this city, though the battle seemed over?

From afar the bodies littered across the battlefield hardly looked like people. From afar you couldn't see the blood, or the great gaping holes ripped into armours, the red messes where faces should be. From afar, you couldn't recognise a friend among the fallen.

Pippin took Merry's hands hands in his own. The right one was cold as ice, and Pippin's face screwed up in an effort not to cry. The left one, though, was warm, and as he stroked his thumb gently over the wrist he could feel a pulse there. There was no dreadful gash on Merry, and though his face was pale, his chest rose and fell. He was alive. He was real. Pippin squeezed his hands gently.

"You'll be all right," he told Merry quietly. He had fallen further into sleep, and did not respond. Pippin wiped a trickle of cold sweat from his cousin's brow, and forced a laugh. "You think Aunt Esmeralda would let me get away with it if you weren't? I won't let you get me in such trouble, Merry dear."

He found that he couldn't even remember Aunt Esmeralda's face.

He sat quietly with Merry in his lap then, until Gandalf hurried down the street, and Merry was taken to the Houses of Healing. Pippin followed them and watched him being set on a bed next to the pale pale forms of Faramir and Éowyn in a room among many that housed the wounded, the dying, fresh pain in each chamber. Then he escaped, found a garden shed full of oversized tools and the smell of foreign flowers and fertilizer, and he closed his eyes against the flickering light filtered through cracks in the shed wall, and had his cry.

And then he got up and went back to Merry's side. Merry was still unmoving, so still, but Pippin took his hand and talked to him anyway, about Aunt Esmeralda, and Fatty's old lazy cat, and the lasses of Hobbiton, until the smile fell to his face easily, and the forests and fields of the Shire seemed to loom before his eyes. Merry still looked pale as death. Pippin kept his thumb over Merry's wrist, feeling the stubborn beat. Eventually he was thrown out and told he had guard duty at the gate.

He could still feel the beat on his thumb. It kept thumping, and that kept him sane.

Then a group of people came up the street, and there was a light on Strider's dark hair, and suddenly it was as if a tight web had been pulled from his own heart. He swallowed, and breathed, for what felt like the first time in a century.

Merry would be all right.


End file.
